'ER' exit strategy is a dusty old plan

BURBANK, Calif. — John Wells has been planning the end of "ER" for a long time.

As a matter of fact, the executive producer started plotting out the end of the show eight or nine years ago, never dreaming that "ER" would last 15 seasons. (The 15th season debuts on Thursday, Sept. 25; it's scheduled to wrap things up in February.)

Wells said way back in Season 6, he "sort of assumed" that "at the end of Season 8, that would be it."

"So I started doing some planning," he said. "I still have those notes. They've gotten a little old and smudged, but one of the reasons Noah Wyle is coming back at the very end is we had always planned that the end of the series would involve Noah returning."

Wyle was the last of the original cast members to leave the show — he starred in 249 episodes from 1996-2004. And his character, Dr. John Carter, went from being a brand-new student in the emergency department to one of the more senior physicians.

"He was so central as a new character at the very beginning — an entering character growing up in the ER," Well said. "So we pulled out those old notes and came out with a lot of new things."

Of course, a lot of things have changed since Season 6. Little things like, oh, pretty much the entire cast.

The cast has turned over more than once since the show premiered in 1994 with George Clooney, Anthony Edwards, Julianna Margulies, Eriq La Salle, Sherry Stringfield and Wyle.

"We really didn't anticipate that we would be able to change casts, particularly after the sort of — with all due modesty — the extraordinary success we had at the beginning," Wells said. "We sort of felt like, 'Wow, as soon as people start to leave, that will be that."'

He said the talk among the writers and producers was that when Sherry Stringfield left (the first time) during Season 3, it was the beginning of the end.

"We thought, 'Oh, well, here it comes. ... We'll be gone by Year 5.' Or it will be a (ratings) trajectory that dips. But I think the people are tied into the world and the characters, and we were able, I think very successfully, to introduce characters slowly so that we didn't have to have actors who came in and had to replace someone. They became integrated in the world in a way that a real workplace works.